Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to ask the minister sitting right over there: could you confirm that it remains the policy of the Turnbull government to increase the pension age to 70 and that you're still trying to get this unfair change through in this budget? Minister, given you're new to the portfolio, and, clearly from question time, you're not quite on top of things, I'll just give you a bit of a sense of the history of this. I remind you that Prime Minister Abbott's 2014 horror budget increased the pension age to 70, meaning Australians born from 1 January 1966 will have to work until they're 70 before they can access an age pension. That means Australians currently in their 50s and late 40s who are starting to plan for their retirement now will have to deal with not being able to access the age pension until they're 70 years old. That's 52 years of an adult working life before being eligible for an age pension.

My own mum retired when she was 67. She'd worked all her life as a nurse, a bookkeeper and a single mum, and she died when she was 70. So, under your changes, Minister, someone like my mum would never have got a cent of pension. It's a devastating change for many Australians who have no chance of working that long, and we will speak up for them. Their bodies won't take it. I challenge you, or your out-of-touch, arrogant Prime Minister, to come to my electorate and tell a bricklayer they have to work until they're 70. My brother almost completed a brickies apprenticeship, but he realised near the end there was no way his body could take it as a career and he quit in his 30s. I have great admiration for people who can stick it out—but until they're 70? Minister, find a farmer in your electorate working in the sun and tell them they've got to work just a bit harder, that they have to stay out there on the farm doing that sort of physical work. Tell that to a nurse, or an aged-care worker. I met with a delegation of aged-care workers brought here by their union, United Voice, a few weeks ago. You could go and tell them the Prime Minister's lines from question time today. 'Sixty is the new 40,' we heard from the Prime Minister. 'Get a better job. If you don't want to be an aged-care worker in Braddon in Tasmania, just go and get a better job.' How snobbish and out of touch. We can't all be an investment banker, now, can we?

This unfair cut can be traced right back to the Abbott government's 2014 Commission of Audit, which recommended the pension age be increased to 70 by the year 2053. Shortly after getting that appalling report, the member for Warringah and then Treasurer Joe Hockey announced that they were ending 'the age of entitlement' and that we were a nation of 'lifters, not leaners'. So they announced their plan, your plan, to increase the pension eligibility age to 70 by 2035. This was a full 18 years before even that abhorrent Commission of Audit recommendation. It's a $3.6 billion cut between 2025 and 2029. That's $3.6 billion that comes from the pockets of ordinary Australians. It's another unfair cut from the Abbott-Turnbull government. The Prime Minister might like to pretend that he's got rid of the unfair cuts from the 2014 horror budget, but he certainly has not. He's hell-bent, and you're hell-bent, on tearing away Australia's social safety net, which we should be so proud we built up over generations. This would make it the oldest pension age in your much beloved Anglosphere that we hear so much about from the former Prime Minister—the UK, New Zealand, Canada, the USA. Only a bloke who worked all his life in an office could think that is a good idea.

My questions to you, Minister, are: can you confirm that the Turnbull government is no different from the Abbott government and that it remains government policy, in your budget documents right there in front of you, to increase the pension age to 70? Minister, could you finally tell us how many Australians currently in the workforce will be affected by this proposal to increase the pension eligibility age to 70? In this forum, in the consideration in detail of the budget—the one hour where you turn up and are supposed to answer questions—Australians deserve a simple, direct answer, not the waffle or spin, not the talking paper clip routine you do, the Microsoft Office assistant. I saw the cartoon, and it was very funny. Tell us the truth about this budget we're debating.

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